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Nobody who wanted to live stood like this in a rowboat. The real boats were 40 to 60 foot cargo barges, and everyone on them stood. Leutze kept the standing and shrank the boat.

The password for the night is Victory or Death, which is not rhetoric but bookkeeping. It is Christmas night, 1776, and sleet is coming in on a northeaster. The army waiting at McConkey's Ferry is all that is left of the cause: some 2,400 men, beaten out of New York and chased across New Jersey. They are also about to evaporate legally, since most enlistments expire at the New Year. Washington's arithmetic is simple. If nothing happens in the next week, there is no army to have opinions about. So something will happen tonight: the Delaware, swollen and running with ice, then nine miles of frozen road, then the Hessian garrison at Trenton before it wakes. The crossing is a freight job, and it goes to professionals: John Glover's Marblehead regiment, Massachusetts sailors and fishermen. Black and white men work the sweeps together, poling big flat Durham cargo boats through the floes in the dark. Horses and 18 cannon go over too, which is why it takes until three in the morning, hours behind schedule. Two supporting crossings downstream fail entirely; Washington attacks anyway. The Hessians, professional soldiers exhausted by weeks of constant alarms rather than the Christmas drinking of legend, get roughly 45 minutes of battle. The attackers take 900 prisoners and pay with a handful of wounded, plus two soldiers frozen to death on the march. It is a skirmish by European standards, and it saves the Revolution: within weeks the army that was dissolving is recruiting. The details of the morning have the texture of luck worked for. Rall, the Hessian colonel, was carried dying into a church. In his pocket, tradition insists, was an unread note warning that the Americans were coming. A loyalist farmer had pressed it on him during cards the night before. Among the wet junior officers that night were a remarkable share of the republic's future. One was an artillery captain named Alexander Hamilton. Another was a lieutenant named James Monroe, who took a musket ball in the shoulder at Trenton and lived to be the fifth president. Washington, having won, recrossed the river with his prisoners, then crossed a third time within the week and beat the British again at Princeton. Ten days, three crossings, two victories: the campaign that saved the war fit inside a fortnight. The painting arrived 75 years later, from Germany. Emanuel Leutze was raised in America and worked in Düsseldorf. He watched Europe's own revolutions fail in 1848 and painted the crossing as an argument that the thing could be done. It runs 12 feet by 21, modeled by American tourists and German friends, with the Rhine standing in for the Delaware. Almost every checkable fact in it is wrong. The flag Monroe grips would not exist for another six months. The boat is a fraction of the size of the real barges. Nobody who wanted to live stood like that in a rowboat, though in a Durham boat everyone stood. And the crew Leutze invented is the truest thing on the canvas: a rifleman at the bow, a man in a Scottish bonnet and a Black man side by side in front of him. Two farmers in broad hats sit near the back. Everyone crossed, the picture insists. New York queued 50,000 deep when it went on show in 1851. The first version stayed in Germany and burned in a British air raid on Bremen in 1942, one war consuming the picture of another. The second fills its wall at the Met, audacity at cargo scale, the one fact Leutze got exactly right.